Web_Design

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
$39.95
It is not a book I would consider mandatory but it gives a good overview of what can be done.
It does not show you how though. It has many good links to some helpful websites to define the look and feel of your project website.

It is nice to have but nor really helpful for anyone I would compare it to a nice set picture catalogues for someone in search of visual ideas.

Head First Web Design
$49.99
Pros: Easy read. Helpful methodologies. Good references.

I have to admit that I found the format of this book interesting. The writers' tried to inject a lot of character, color and some lightheartedness into something that can become very dry reading. Some aspects becoming tiring after a while, but an overall good job. There are some good strategies here. The books delivers good pointers on how to handle information architecture, lay out a web page and color theory. I also appreciated that the book was sprinkled with links to great online resources for site designers and ideas on how to moved forward once you've read the book.

Cons: Needs more meat

This book is great for folks needing to build simple web sites. That being said, I wish it could have touched a little more on the back-end, server side of developing a web site. It did touch on how to build a blog, but I would have like more discussion on database technologies and how to build an application.

Still a nice job and a learned a few things.

Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics
$44.99
I felt the need to express how well written this book is for the beginning web designer. The author doesn't bog the reader down with overly complex examples of code. I've been designing web pages using Dreamweaver for a few years now and never bothered with the code. I've always created my content in Photoshop and just dropped the images into the software. After reading through this book, I am not only able to simplify my web pages through code editing, but also, was able to optimize my graphics content.
Right now, I am now trudging through a book to learn JavaScript. I am getting through the book, but not nearly as easily as I did the Learning Web Design book. To be fair, the subject is a bit more complex, but the way that the JavaScript book is written causes me to have to constantly look up unexplained technical terms and syntax of the code examples to figure out why they work. I never had to do that with the Learning Web Design book.

Web Design For Dummies, 2nd Edition
$24.99
This book starts with no (or very little) knowledge of web design, and does a good job of covering the basics. One could fashion a basic website using only this book as reference. Advanced topics would require further reference, but this is certainly a solid foundation.